Year of Return

August 2019, is exactly 400 years after the arrival of the first recorded landing of a slave ship in Virginia, which saw the acceleration of the horrendous Middle Passage, hundreds of descendants of former enslaved Africans will make a triumphant return to the land of our ancestry. The trip will take us to Ghana: the land of Kwame Nkrumah-the father of Ghana’s independence and a co-founder of the Organization of African Unity; the country where the great pan-Africanist Dr W. E. B. DuBois spent his final years; the land where Ashanti Kings still hold court and mediate disputes in time-honoured traditions passed down through generations; the land that has preserved more slave dungeons used in the transatlantic slave trade than any other country on the continent. Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African country to gain its independence from Europeans and is today a thriving democracy, yet its traditions, customs and culture are almost undiluted.